L.A. Garment Workers Are Robbed of Millions by Employers, Feds Say

What has this country come to? The U.S. Labor Department Wage and Hour Division said this week that Los Angeles was, by far, the nation's capital of underpaying garment workers, a group largely comprised of immigrants. Garment workers were shorted $3,004,085 during the 2014 fiscal year, the department said.

Almost all were based "in and around Los Angeles," the feds said in a statement. That pencils out to an average of $1,900 for each of the 1,549 employees who complained that they had been stiffed by their bosses.

In one case, federal officials said they found that L.A. area workers were being paid $270 a week for about 50 hours a week of work. Though some employers pay "by the piece," feds warned that "at least" the $7.25 federal minimum wage (it's $9 in California) must apply to all work. And working more than 40 hours a week means overtime.

David Weil, administrator for the Wage and Hour Division:

Fierce competition in the garment industry leads many contract shops to lower the cost of their services, frequently at the expense of workers’ wages. When workers don’t receive the wages to which they are legally entitled, they can’t afford the basics like food, rent and child care.

The industry was already rife with minimum wage and overtime violations, the department says, but that things have been especially bad between 2009 and now, when $15 million in unpaid wages have been recovered:

The apparel industry typically employs large populations of immigrants with limited English language proficiency who are unaware of their rights or are reluctant to speak up. This makes them particularly vulnerable to labor violations.

The department says it has "stepped up surveillance" of downtown L.A.'s fashion district and other industry locales in Southern California. Federal investigators will even go so far as to sell off the property of employers if they don't pay up, U.S. labor officials said.

Ruben Rosalez, administrator for the Wage and Hour Division’s Western Region, says, "We are committed to strong enforcement."

There will be so many government eyes on the fashion district these days that the feds might as well sew a few pieces themselves while they're camped out.

Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a
young stringer, the New York Times.